A mid-issue patch dropped for The Secret World yesterday, bringing some skill changes (mostly with elites) and the new Museum of the Occult.

The museum is TSW’s sort-of answer to player housing. It is a private instance (which friends can visit) that allows for some customization, although it’s here that we have to depart from the assumption that this is housing in the traditional sense. What it is is a glorified trophy room, a huge grind, and a path to a few nice abilities (such as combat pets!).

This isn’t to say the museum is an instant disappointment — it’s just important to check expectations when you come to it, I think.

Last night I logged in, eager to set my museum up. I recall the facade of the museum from one of the game’s missions, the one that has you looking up a YouTube video on a lecture, I think.

Inside the lobby is this quite-impressive statue of… myself. I’m not quite sure to make of this. Hubris? The museum making ME its primary display on cult oddities? A weird fantasy about hanging out with a giant version of myself?

To the right there is the Curator, a stuffy fellow who follows you around in this quiet place, constantly freaking you out with his presence. He also sells unlocks for the various wings and the pedestals for the rooms.

As I said, the museum is definitely set up to be a huuuuge grind and AP/PAX/black bullion sink. Probably great for endgamers who have nothing left to do with their currency. I can’t even start to fathom how long it’ll take to completely flesh out the place.

Here’s the layout: 12 rooms, each of which have to be unlocked. In each room are several pedestals on which you can place statues of various beasties from your travels, from the rare to the incredibly common. I unlocked room 4 first, the local legends one.

Other than getting the rooms opened and the statues unlocked and posing them, there doesn’t seem to be any way to customize this place. You certainly can’t change the music, the walls, or put any sort of furniture around. I mean, it’s better than NOTHING and it is very TSW, but I would quickly trade it all for a small apartment that allows for more customization.

I mean, how much are you really going to hang out in a museum? There’s no quick teleport here (yet), so it takes a little bit of travel to head to London and go to it. And when you’re there, what’s there to do? Not that dang much.

I checked out the requirements to unlock statues for each of these platforms. As you might expect, it’s kind of ridiculous. There are threee or four types of requirements for each, including kills and lore drops. I guess the lore drops are new, because I did not have any of them. When I looked into it, what I found said that they’re rare drops from those specific mobs. So for my revenants pedestal, for example, I needed two drops. Where do I grind revenants, for pete’s sake?

I know there are guides being made and I can probably hang back a little until pioneers pave a better path ahead of me. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the promise of rather expensive combat pets and a few other niceties from the gift shop, I probably wouldn’t bother with this as it is.

4 thoughts on “The Secret World: Very first impressions of the Museum of the Occult”

So it’s basically GW1 Hall of Monuments, but with an added currency sink. Cool. You’re right, though, who knows when we would get around to it. My SP are still being used to unlock Aegis upgrades, AP for Scenario stuffs, BB for gear upgrades, and Pax for the next speed upgrade. Unless the rewards from this are more passive/more lucrative to acquire, this looks very low on the priority scale.

I’ll have a blog post of my own on the museum sometime soonish, but suffice it to say I’m not impressed. The effort to reward ratio is atrocious, and none of the rewards much appeal to me anyway.

Some things to note:

You’re not really getting new abilities (I guess it depends on how you define abilities), nor combat pets. They’re consumables that give you an hour long buff. While active, you have a chance to proc some random bonus. This bonus uses a monster model for its animation, but it’s not really a mob or a pet. It won’t be tanking hits for you or following you around or anything.

For example, one potential guardian is an Orochi buckler drone. It gives you a brief damage reduction buff, and for the duration the drone will appear and play its “hunker down” animation. But that’s just for about five seconds, and then the drone disappears until you proc it again.

The temporary nature of guardians is one of the main reasons I won’t be bothering with them. No way in Hell I’m spending bullion on something that gets used up.

That said, I’m excited about the new lore. They added a ton of it. Look in your lore journal, and you’ll see a new “bestiary” section with over 250 (!) new entries.

It doesn’t seem to be too hard to get the new lore, either. Only some of it is dropped, and the drop rate seems reasonably high. At most it took me maybe five minutes of grinding mobs to get a dropped lore. Sometimes it dropped almost immediately.

SylowJune 16, 2016 / 12:42 pm

Yea. The new lore is the great thing. I did one elite dungeon only yesterday, and collected several lores there. I am looking forward to collecting the rest. 🙂

On the museum itself, I unlocked all wings, as that only cost pax. I unlocked a few monsters, but the 50 AP each quickly stopped that again. But hey, next to augments my character has no way to spend AP, and in terms of augments I have most I want. I only have one yellow at level 1 and several purples could still use a number of upgrades, but nothing of that is important, so I don’t mind pouring AP into the museum. (I so scenarios sparingly, anyway, so augments come in slowly and I tend to be close to the AP cap most of the time. )

So for me the museum is just another way of spending AP, which would otherwise go to waste. If there’s BB to be spent, I haven’t see that yet, but I also have to admit that I didn’t take a too close look at it yet, so it’s very likely that I missed that.

For what it it, it’s quite fine. Some more decoration options would be nice, but hey, perhaps they will come in the future? (But I also agree, why the statue of my character? If I could remove that one, I’d immediately do so. It’d be great if you would be able replace it with a choice of the statues you already have unlocked. ) All in all, the comparison with the hall of monuments of GW1 is quite matching… let’s see if that means that we’ll at some time will have TSW2. 😀

The buff consumables I am not interested in, the t-shirts you can acquire on the other hand, there are some beautiful ones among those. One of them is from a cabal mate. My girl also joined the competition and I at first was very surprised why they did not pick her, until I took a closer look and saw what they actually wanted to do. The image she made had way too much detail and was not viable as in-game t-shirt.

Also interestingly enough, while the skill changes here are only mentioned as a sidenote, I am quite happy about them. Yes, some people who run absolutely optimized setups now have to rework them, mostly due to the change of elemental force, but I already started to adjust and find the changes refreshing.

There’s so much new things you can now do with the changes of the elites, so many more which now can be brought to good use. These changes and the change of the New York Raid might very well result in a number of new weapon combinations being used, instead of the combinations of pistol/shotgun and elementalism/blood or elementalism/assault rifle dominating the DPS scene. (These combinations up to now had an inherent advantage in the New York Raid due to the buff circles buffing specific weapon combinations. The new circles work differently and are not weapon specific any more. And since people already optimized these combinations to no end in the raid, they also used them for anything else, as they already had those setups at hand. )

I am quite curious to see what setups the community comes up with. I consider it unlikely that the new vulnerability system will be ignored. Some people will start using it, and it will go through the community. I hope that the end result will be that people before a harder dungeon communicate who applies which vulnerability, instead of all building setups where the second weapon is picked with the idea of it providing vulnerability to the primary weapon. (It this build philosophy prevails, chaos will be the main tanking tool for all tanks, with blade or hammer as secondary to provide an interrupt which gives magic vulnerability. Chaos currently lacks an ability which is a good interrupt and also provides melee vulnerability. )

The actual potential and power is higher if the group communicates and adjusts the setup to each other, but self-providing setups of course are easier for the lazy people. I hope that the first method prevails and am afraid that the second might win. Time will tell, for the moment I have a lot of playing around and trying new stuff to do. 😀

SylowJune 16, 2016 / 12:50 pm

And as a sidenote: I really “appreciate” the map of the place. It tells me a lot on how they build stuff in London. *evil grin*

Honestly, that map and thus the layout of the place might be the weakest part about it all. I mean, there are also no closed and locked doors on the hallways, so the building really is build like a kind of diagram tree. For any other game, that would not be worth mentioning, but considering the usual quality and attention of detail TSW displays, this is quite an outlier and would make sense to discretely correct at some time.